Google’s robot apocalypse emergency plan is just four lines of code

Google is a company that works very, very hard to let normals know how fun it is to work there, almost to the point where you can see the seams of the plan and can’t help but roll your eyes every time the company releases a new joke or easter egg.

This year, the Google Maps team did a very good job keeping our eyes facing forward instead of rolling around in our heads with its Pokémon April Fools’ joke. The team even followed up its joke with real-life rewards, that is, if you caught ’em all. Now, Google has another joke that kept our eyes from wandering: the company’s plan in case of a Terminator-style Judgment Day.

Sure, you can still type “do a barrel roll” into Google’s search engine and get a dizzying surprise, but if you visit a certain web address, you can check out Google’s plan to preserve the company in case murder machines covered in living skin are rampaging across the planet. The four simple lines of text make sure that the two most famous Terminator models do not kill Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, thus securing the company’s masterminds.

Joking aside, the text file was put there to mark the 20th anniversary of robots.txt, the magical document that excludes pages from Google’s crawler.

Of course, Google having the ability to inject code into every single T-1000 and T-800 suggests that the company will have either created — or at the very least, generated commands for — the killer robots. Perhaps the company is anticipating its Glass headset to take a turn toward augmented reality. Sure, Google claims it won’t pursue any kind of military robotics contract, but a robot apocalypse funded by Google itself isn’t technically a military application.